How are You Preventing Mailto-Link Harvesting?

Posted by Cliff on Thursday October 2, 2003 @01:44PM from the making-it-harder-for-the-spammers dept.

mixwhit asks: "In our ever increasing effort against spam, we are now considering replacing all mailto: links on our website with something unharvestable (i.e. 'user (at) address', javascript mailto links, character entity evasion, etc.). Obviously this won't stop the spam, but it seems prudent to stop the harvesting so that the spam may slow down someday (year 2024 maybe?). What are others doing with this issue? We would prefer to preserve mailto link clickability, but also only want to make this adjustment once." One suggestion I would make is to put your email address in an image. People can read it, but harvesters won't be able to harvest it (unless they download the image for OCR), but any barrier you can place in front of the spammer, without blocking people honestly interested in communicating with you, is probably a good thing.

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Re:Mail form by jpsowin · 2003-10-02 14:25 · Score: 1, Redundant

I agree with this in concept (if it is implemented correctly), as long as people understand that FormMail is one of the biggest exploits of spammers out there. They just use the form to use your server to send their emails. Don't believe me? Check any server log. ;)